Memorial Day

After Walt Whitman A last formality is running late, as a life can't, this hot day. The final ethereal glow of the sun seems to come up from underfoot in this parkland of polysyllabic death. These deep graves, two this time, neatly cut into the earth, await the arrivals, and two adjacent heaps of damp fertile glebe are half blanketed by reticent dark tarpaulins. After the full moon's first moments of horizon-magnified fact and risen largesse, it has contracted as our heaven has passed it by and now it floats above the crowns of the inky trees and well beyond bare roofs. It has always been an entity born dead—not a phantom, as must be this son, a muddy part of whom soared from cratered waste lands far away before landing here, and also this veteran father, whose heart staggered into an ER and failed after he heard what circumstance had done to his one boy. No horses—hearses, the first two cars. A corps of six men— they bear the heavy coffined corpse of the father toward his very small opening in the planet; and six more envoys of duty, with much-practiced attentiveness, slow-step the light son, an imperfect cadaver with handles, to his own last place. White gloves lift up the draped famed cloth, super-striped and starry, from the younger casket, fold it just so— hands with hands over hands in ritual honor, a ceremony neither of mystical creed nor of doubter's midnights—then they advance it to the one who remains. She's looking away from her burials, down at the blades of moon grass. She feels no great gut blows from startled convulsive big drums that shake the spirits of mourners, nor any whirring of equally perilous small drums that might reduce the silence. The son is submitted as lifeless organism to dirt; the father’s remains descend into his pit alongside, likewise on tightly held ropes men slowly let slip. (In foremost ranks of a final unbecoming these two fell alike.) The ropes snake back up into what's left of natural light— remainder of the ancient calculus of day and night. From a boom box ten paces away, the familiar bugled notes say that the journey of these remains is done. Even if no grief shadows the bugler, bugles do sound it, word it—that unacceptable sentence of slow notes. Distant, on overtime, respectful, yet much too near, a stranger waits to start up a backhoe. On such occasions, after courage of soldiers or folly of command or cold wrong purposes among patriarchs, lords, kings, and freed madness in red valleys, mountains, cities, villages, in schools, shrines, sheds, beds, mud-brick hearts, we have offered up our mortally wounded, un- comprehending remembrance. We look down or away and notice the impassive grass under our bloody weight.